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Toronto cyclists fear dooring, but police don't track it

Cycling advocates complain there are no statistics on “door prizes" because police won’t count them. And fines are tiny compared with Chicago.

For cyclists, the streets of Toronto can turn lethal in a split second. One of the most common crashes involves car doors suddenly opening as a cyclist passes, but Toronto police don't track such incidents because they're not classed as "collisions." (Rene Johnston / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

By Eric Andrew-GeeStaff Reporter

Tues., June 25, 2013

Chavisa Brett was riding her bike to work when the door of a parked car swung open in front of her.

She struck the door and flipped over it, landing on the street at the intersection of Carlton and Yonge Sts. In an essay she later wrote for Cycle Toronto, Brett says she needed 25 x-rays and spent two weeks off work as a result of her injuries in last year’s crash.

Every cyclist knows the fear, and many know the feeling: a parked car opens its door, and you don’t have time to stop. Crash.

It’s called “getting doored.”But in Toronto, it’s the accident that dare not speak its name – at least officially. Because of the way Toronto police define a collision, almost all doorings go unrecorded.

There were 1,315 collisions involving bikes in Toronto in 2011, the last year for which complete data is available. That doesn’t include a single dooring.

“There’s no report created directly out of a dooring incident,” said Clint Stibbe, a spokesperson for Traffic Services.

Cycling advocates say the missing dooring stats are a blind spot, and indicative of widespread underreporting of the perils faced by Toronto cyclists navigating roads with little room between parked cars on the right and traffic on the left.

“If we don’t have a proper handle on the extent of the problem — if we’re not even tracking the number of door prizes — how can we adequately deal with it?” said Jared Kolb, executive director of Cycle Toronto. (Cyclists often use the sarcastic phrase “door prize” to describe dooring, a play on lottery winnings given at an event.)

Police maintain there’s no reason to keep records of doorings. “Realistically, there’s no reason for us to track it, because it doesn’t meet the criteria of collision,” said Stibbe.

The Toronto, York Region and Waterloo police all define a collision as “the contact resulting from the motion of a motor vehicle or streetcar or its load that produces property damage, injury, or death.”

A parked car opening its door doesn’t count as “motion,” they say.

“If you said how many days a week is it sunny, we’re not going to track that,” added Stibbe.

Chicago police have been tracking doorings for three years, with between 250 and 300 doorings reported each year, says Charlie Short, bike safety and education manager with the Chicago department of transportation.

He estimates that about two-thirds of doorings get reported.

Short says doorings cause serious injuries. In 50 per cent of Chicago doorings, an ambulance was called to the scene, while the figure dropped to 30 per cent for other cycling crashes. There have also been two deaths related to doorings in Chicago in recent years, he said.

The Windy City may be a window into the scope of Toronto’s hidden dooring problem. The two cities have similar climates, and similar biking seasons. And Toronto and Chicago have nearly identical populations: 2,791,140 and 2,707,120 respectively.

They also have similar numbers of cycling collisions: in Chicago, an average of about 1,500, not including doorings, since 2005, compared with Toronto’s 1,170 average for the years between 2006 and 2011.

But the penalties for motorists who door cyclists in Chicago and Toronto could hardly be more different. Chicago city council recently passed a bill that increased the fines for dooring to $1,000. The new fine becomes law on July 6.

In Ontario, meanwhile, the maximum fine for improperly opening a vehicle’s door, or opening it longer than necessary — the violations that cover dooring — is $85. In 2011, just 118 people were convicted of the offences Ontario-wide. The Ministry of Transportation isn’t sure how many of these convictions involved cyclists.

“The fines are not in keeping with the severity of what a ‘door prize’ can do,” said Kolb.

Kolb and other cycling advocates are meeting with Minister of Transportation Glen Murray later this week to discuss the ministry’s planned Ontario Cycling Strategy. Kolb says dooring will be on the agenda.

The ministry, however, says it has no plans to ask the courts to raise the fine for dooring.

Stibbe, of Traffic Services, said the force will not begin acknowledging dooring any time soon. “There’s no intention of tracking it,” he said.

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